SCHOOL TRACKING HARMS MILLIONS, SOCIOLOGIST FINDS

STANFORD - A new study on tracking in high schools shows the system of
placing some students in college preparatory courses and others in easier
math and science courses is "harming millions of students in American
society," says Sanford Dornbusch, the Reed-Hodgson Professor of Human
Biology, who holds joint appointments in the Department of Sociology and the
School of Education at Stanford University.

Tracking doesn't limit opportunities for the top tenth or so of students
but is particularly disastrous for students whose abilities fall in the
middle range, Dornbusch said.

Eighth grade test scores are critical to a students' high school
placement, yet many who do well on those tests - particularly Latino and
African American students in the Northern California schools studied - are
misplaced in courses below their abilities, said Dornbusch, who led a
research team on the subject.

The tracking system also misplaced about a fifth of white students who
aspire to go to four-year colleges, he said.

"At minimum, more students should be in higher tracks," Dornbusch said.

Perhaps even more shocking, he said, are findings that students who intend
to go to college and their parents often don't know when a student has been
tracked out of college-preparatory science and math classes. Biology courses
with names like "Ecology and You" or "Life on Earth" hide the fact that they
will not prepare a student for admission to a four-year college. Similarly, a
student assigned to business math or other courses that teachers tend to
nickname "bonehead" math will find it hard to get back on track for admission
to a four-year college.

School principals and teachers may not want students and parents to know
which courses are college preparation, Dornbusch suggested in his recent
inaugural address as president of the Society for Research on Adolescence. If
they knew, more students and parents would complain and demand better
placements, he said.

Dornbusch urged researchers to consider tracking to be a "key variable" in
their studies of youth and what leads to success, but he also said enough
studies already indict tracking, so that school policymakers should consider
changing their practices now.

Jeannie Oakes of the University of California-Los Angeles concluded that
"the tracking system is more a product of inertia in a school system than of
the abilities of students" in the schools she studied, Dornbusch said.

The Stanford tracking study led by Dornbusch involved analyzing all school
records since the fifth grade for approximately 1,200 students in six diverse
San Francisco Bay Area high schools. The researchers selected at random an
equal proportion of students with high, middle and low grades for each
gender-ethnicity combination so that there were no ethnic differences in
school grades for their sample. They then compared the students' school
records to their current placement in high school math and science courses.

They did not look at English or social studies courses, Dornbusch said,
because those subjects were hardly tracked in the schools studied.

The researchers found that the proportion of high-ability African American
and Latino American students not taking college prep courses in math and
science was more than twice that of white and Asian American students of the
same ability level.

For all groups, the proportion of college prep math and science courses
markedly increased with higher parent education. Having more highly educated
parents, however, did not influence African and Latino American enrollments
nearly as much as for whites and Asian Americans.

A 1990 study by Dornbusch and Phil Ritter found that "the level of parent
education had much less influence on school performance of minority
adolescents in the context of a predominantly minority community."

"Under such conditions, the school's offerings may reflect the typical
characteristics of students from the community, and the influence of parents
on school performance is thereby reduced," Dornbusch said.

In the new study, the factor that most determined a student's first high
school tracking placement was his or her eighth grade test score. Other
factors that were significantly related were elementary school grades,
attendance and negative comments about a student's behavior in his or her
files.

Among students who had high educational expectations and thought they were
in the college-prep track, Dornbusch found almost half of the African
American and Latino American students were not actually in college-prep math
and science courses, and about 20 percent of white and Asian American
students weren't either.

"This finding upsets me," Dornbusch said. "This set of data points to a
systemic pattern of ignorance, and African Americans and Hispanics are even
less aware of the extent to which the tracking system is short-changing them.
These results help us to understand why so many talented and hard-working
minority students are ineligible for four-year colleges and universities.

"And of course, the paucity of these minorities among scientists and
engineers is a necessary consequence."

But, he added, "if one fifth of non-Hispanic whites and Asians are also
misinformed, we are discussing a major national problem that does not just
affect disadvantaged minorities."

Some of the findings were foreshadowed in an earlier study by Dornbusch.
In four Northern California high schools, he found that 55 percent of the
students could not correctly state even one admission requirement for the
University of California, and 76 percent could not identify a single
California State University requirement. Moreover, good students in
high-level math and science courses "were just as likely to be ignorant about
college requirements as students in the lower tracks."

A second study with Jose Carrasco of San Jose State University found that
teachers of high school classes with mostly Latino and African American
students were less likely than others to know current college admission
requirements, Dornbusch said.

The best students often overcome bad placements, Dornbusch said. He cited,
for example, a Latino student of his at Stanford who was placed in Algebra
0.5 in the ninth grade but wound up taking algebra and geometry together in
his sophomore year at the suggestion of a teacher who recognized his
abilities.

"His was a success story, but it took an unusual combination of teacher
and student to make it happen," Dornbusch said.

"Students at the very top of eighth grade math ability, perhaps those
above the 80th percentile, and certainly those above the 90th percentile,
usually do well in math and science regardless of their initial placement,"
Dornbusch said. Those who are initially misplaced in lower- track courses
still had a moderately high probability of eventually taking chemistry or
physics.

But a tracking system can't be justified, he said, on the basis that it
doesn't cause harm to the top 10 to 20 percent of the students.

Student grades also indicated that "being at the bottom of the high track
appears to bring better educational returns than being at the top of the low
track," he said. "High-ability students in the lower tracks learn little and
get lower grades than those of equal ability in the higher track.

"Most kids can learn a lot but aren't learning much, and too often schools
use lack of ability as an excuse for poor performance. Baby- sitting is not a
substitute for education."

The Stanford researchers also checked to see if students expressing a
desire to go to college were possibly overestimating their own abilities.
They did another analysis just of those students whose eighth grade math
scores put them in the top half. All such students, in their view, should
have been assigned to college preparatory math.

"The proportion of these students mis-assigned to lower track classes
without their knowledge was about 30 percent for the disadvantaged minorities
(African Americans and Hispanics) and about 13 percent for the others,"
Dornbusch said.

They also found the original placement in science for these students
strongly affected the probability that they would take chemistry or physics
in their junior and senior years. "Students of average ability assigned to
[college-prep] biology were 10 times more likely to take chemistry or physics
than students assigned to 'baby biology,' " he said.

"High school placements made in the eighth grade have profound
occupational and educational outcomes," Dornbusch concluded. "For students in
the middle, these decisions are more arbitrary and less likely to be based on
ability."

Funding for the study was provided by the Carnegie Foundation of New York,
the Spencer Foundation, the Drown Foundation of Los Angeles and Jill and Boyd
Smith.

The research team included Brad Brown of the University of Wisconsin,
Larry Steinberg of Temple University, and Zen-yin Chen, Phil Ritter, Harriet
Romo, Ricardo Stanton-Salazar and Ken Wood of Stanford.

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